The first film at Fantastic Fest I saw this year was Primate, a horror movie about a beloved pet chimp getting rabies and, well, you know how that ends up going. Johannes Roberts, who is no stranger to terrifying animal movies, shows us just how badly a chimp can beat us up.
When you think about the argument of how many men can take on one gorilla, it kind of makes sense that a movie about one single chimp is terrifying. Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) heads home to Hawai’i with her friends after being away for college. Her little sister and father (Troy Kotsur) have missed her and Lucy has kept her distance since the death of her mother. But being back home means reconnecting with family, friends, and the family chimp, Ben. Yes, they have a chimp.
Ben was part of her mother’s research project as a linguistics professor and has since become a “part of the family.” Look, as someone with a cat named Benjamin/Benji/Ben, the use of the name in this did have me afraid I’d wake up to a rabid house cat one day. And that’s where Primate has a lot of fun. The film is basically just a “we can’t escape the rabid animal” movie and that’s all you need sometimes.
Think about the plot of Jaws. Is it not “shark wants revenge and will get it”? That’s kind of what you have here and yes, it is a movie full of gnarly kills but that’s what makes it fun to watch. Especially at a festival like Fantastic Fest with an audience full of genre fans.
Sometimes, you just want to see a chimp go a little wild
The use of practical effects for Ben did make Primate more terrifying than it would have been with a CGI monster monkey. You can feel his presence and Roberts uses the darkness of the setting to his advantage. Bt what I found the most fun about Primate was how the film traps its characters in their stand-off against Ben.
With a movie that does severely limit how many deaths you can have and how creative you can be with them, it is fascinating to see how much fun Roberts seemed to have with them. This chimp does not hold back and even though this has been his family for years, the rabies are doing the talking and I think it is both heartbreaking and yet makes Ben the perfect kind of “villain” of this story.
Is this the new Jaws? No. But Jaws did give us this kind of horror movie where we go a little overboard with what an animal unhinged could and would do. I don’t think that a rabid chimp would stake out its prey and stop and nothing to kill them all but hey, that’s the beauty of movie magic. You can have fun with stuff like that and Primate has a lot of fun with its audience.
So if you love a gory animal gone wild, this one is for you.
(featured image: Paramount Pictures)
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